According to the American priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor, "every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse"("Barbara Brown"). In Anton Chekov's The Bet, a lawyer and a banker face the chance that Brown Taylor is talking about but they fail to make things better. Having made an impulsive high-stakes wager that the lawyer can stand almost complete isolation for fifteen years, both banker and lawyer suffer as a result. In The Bet, human interaction makes things worse, but it is the lack of human interaction that makes things truly terrible. Chekov's story expresses the consequences of prolonged isolation. In The Bet, both the lawyer and the banker lose, but ultimately, it is the lawyer who loses most between the two because he has lost more of his sanity, empathy, and faith in society due to his prolonged isolation.
Both the lawyer and the banker begin the story sane, but each one is diminished by their bet. The banker agrees to bet two million dollars that the lawyer will not be able to stay in almost complete isolation for fifteen years. He is almost mocking the lawyer. "[t]o me two million is a trifle,"(Chekov 2) says the banker, "but you are losing three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or four because you will not stay longer"(Chekov 2). The banker starts out cocky but realizes that he may have been too cocky when he sees that the lawyer may last the full fifteen years. He becomes consumed with worry about losing the bet. In the end, he is willing to consider doing things he would never have done at the beginning of the bet. But he still has more sanity than the lawyer. Isolation has completely destroyed the lawyer. When he enters isolation, he is a functioning human being; when he leaves, he has lost all of his interest in humanity and everything associated with it. He expresses his hatred of humanity when he says, "[y]ou have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty"(Chekov 7). The decision the lawyer has made to renounce his need for human interaction leaves him even worse than the banker.
By the end of The Bet, the banker is so disturbed at the thought of losing that he considers murdering the lawyer. He has lost all empathy for the lawyer. Speaking to himself, the banker says, "[p]oor creature!" thought the banker, "he is asleep and most likely dreaming of ...
